It’s not dead yet!

Borepatch called my attention to that article and he’s dead wrong about the command line being over.

I don’t know about the C:\ folks but in the land of bash ($), c shell (%) and router monkeys (#) the command line is as alive and well as ever. Even if you don’t know where to find the terminal on your OS, I can assure you the Internet runs on the command line.

Seriously, I only posted because (a) I saw the food fight on Slashdot [rolls eyes to the food fight participants] and (b) it’s Yet Another Holy War over GUI vs. WIMP interface on Slashdot [rolls eyes].

There sure seem to be a bunch of folks who are taking it seriously. Me, I’m an old C Shell/PERL monkey, but it’s been a while since I had a dog in that fight. But I love cron scripts, ’cause I’m lazy.

The command line will never be dead. People have been saying that for years. There is too much power available on the command line for it to disappear. Every sys-admin, developer, and engineer I know lives on the command line.

Matlab is a command line based system, a GUI input limits the use into what the designer intended. The command line allows the user to combine commands to do things no one originally intended to be possible.

A great example of this is Team Foundation, you can do stuff on the command line much more quickly and efficiently than by playing games with the GUI.

There’s no faster way to get it done than with a command-line. There’s no more efficient way than scripting those commands.

If there’s a fight over it, then it’s between users on opposite ends of the hardware spectrum. But it’s not a democracy, and the number of people who feel strongly one way or the other is completely irrelevant. If some suspendered Unix guru loves it, he’s probably a lot more productive than the five reset button pushers who don’t understand it.

To anyone who thinks the command line is dead, I have one thing to say: Balls!

Seriously, there’s no way one could run an IT dept with ANY sort of efficiency without access to a command line. Oh, I’m sure you can find GUI shortcuts, but some tasks just can’t be done worth a damn with just the GUI. For instance, scripting.

It was extremely well hidden. We stumbled on it when I was working at Central Point Software when we discovered that backing up a file named .sony to a floppy disk would cause the floppy drive to go nuts and destroy itself. Apparently the original Mac ROM routines used a command labeled .sony to talk to the Sony designed floppy disk drive.

Apple patched their OS immediately when we discovered how to destroy their hardware with our backup application.